Senior Applied AI Engineer

Job Description

Planet is seeking a Senior Artificial Intelligence (AI) Engineer to join their AI Research team in San Francisco. This role involves contributing to the vision of creating a “Queryable Earth” by working with vision-language models (VLMs) and contrastive vision-language embedding models to extract insights from geospatial imagery. The engineer will collaborate with multidisciplinary teams to co-develop AI/ML solutions for Planet’s geospatial imagery.Responsibilities:

• Develop and optimize multimodal LLM applications.
• Create and optimize embeddings for large-scale satellite imagery datasets.
• Design and execute machine learning workflows for geospatial analysis.
• Contribute to the development of a "Queryable Earth" functionality using natural language queries.
• Collaborate with research scientists and engineers to design innovative models for remote sensing applications.
• Assist in automating the preprocessing and labeling geospatial data for AI tasks.
• Evaluate and improve algorithms for feature detection and classification in satellite imagery.
• Potentially optimize and fine-tune novel VLMs tailored for Earth observation data.

Requirements:

• Advanced degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Remote Sensing, or similar.
• 10+ years experience Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Remote Sensing, or a related field.
• Experience with Remote Sensing, Satellite Image Analysis, and Geospatial Data.
• Experience with rapid prototyping of AI Applications, especially search, LLMs, and agents including OpenAI agents SDK, Model Context Protocol, Langchain, etc.
• Extensive experience in developing and deploying AI/ML models, with a focus on geospatial applications and foundation models, embeddings, and frontier VLLMs.
• Excellent understanding of generative AI techniques, including LLMs and embeddings.
• Proficient in Python and deep learning frameworks and high-performance distributed computing and IO frameworks using the python ecosystem, e.g. xarrays, dask, numpy, BigQuery, etc.
• Expertise with computer vision and natural language processing techniques and familiarity with joint multimodal embeddings generators like CLIP and its more recent variants, as well as the operation and use of MMVLMS (multi-model vision-language models)
• Familiarity with multi-dimensional geometry, statistics, linear algebra, optimization, and the internals of standard deep learning architectures
• Fluency in full stack-development development and effective GUI implementation for web applications which rely on back-end scientific and AI systems
• Knowledge of geospatial data formats and analysis tools (e.g., GDAL, GeoPandas, Rasterio)
• Excellent problem-solving skills and ability to work in a dynamic research environment
• Experience with cloud computing platforms (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure) and big data workflows
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills

Benefits and Perks:

• Comprehensive Medical, Dental, and Vision plans
• Health Savings Account (HSA) with a company contribution
• Generous Paid Time Off in addition to holidays and company-wide days off
• 16 Weeks of Paid Parental Leave
• Wellness Program and Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• Home Office Reimbursement
• Monthly Phone and Internet Reimbursement
• Tuition Reimbursement and access to LinkedIn Learning
• Equity
• Commuter Benefits (if local to an office)
• Volunteering Paid Time Off